Dai Due

With his impressive size and big, scraggly beard, Dai Due chef-owner Jesse Griffiths looks like a mountain man, but he’s 100 percent Texan. He knows where to hunt dove and rabbit, where to gig flounder and harvest oysters, and he knows what to do with it all once he gets his hands on it. There is probably not a more quintessential Texas spot in Austin than Dai Due, a restaurant that celebrates the state’s bounty and many influences with power and finesse.

The restaurant will honor Mexico by taking you to the coast for shrimp campechana and drop you in the middle of the state for tomato salad and venison machacado served with jalapenos and cotija cheese. Louisiana meets Central Texas with plump crawfish etouffee-stuffed quail, and European traditions are found in kielbasa. You want a sliced-up pepper to spice up your sweet glazed pork chop (the best in town)? They’ll bring you one that smells and tastes like it just was plucked off the vine. One of the most charming parts of this restaurant is its ability to reach across the spectrum, from a brawny primeval beef rib whipped with the tangy lash of sauerkraut to a delicate, refreshing pink guava sorbet, the perfect light note on which to finish. Synthesis and harmony: Dai Due reaches those tricky calibrations with a natural ease.